Peinirli (Πεϊνιρλί) is the boat. That is the defining piece, and everything else is filling. A yeasted dough is shaped into a long oval, the edges pinched and rolled up into raised walls, the two ends drawn into points so the whole thing reads as a small canoe. The well in the middle gets cheese, sometimes egg, sometimes meat, and the bread bakes open-faced so the rim crisps while the center stays soft and molten. It is Turkish-influenced and baked, not griddled or wrapped, which sets it apart from almost everything else in the Greek street repertoire.
The make starts with the dough, and a good peinirli lives or dies there. The dough should be enriched enough to take direct oven heat without drying, rolled and stretched into an oval roughly the length of a forearm, then formed by folding the long sides inward and crimping. The pinch matters: the wall has to be tall and sealed or the molten center runs out and pools on the tray. Cheese goes in first, filling the trough, and the classic choice is a melting cheese that stretches and browns rather than a dry crumble. The boat goes into a hot oven until the rim is deep gold and the cheese is bubbling and just catching color at the edges. Sloppy execution shows up as a flat shape with no real wall, an under-baked pale rim that bends instead of crunching, or a thin smear of cheese that bakes to a skin instead of staying liquid. Good execution is a crisp browned hull, a center that pulls into strands when you tear it, and enough structural integrity to pick up by the ends and eat like a handheld.
From the plain cheese boat, the dish branches by what else lands in the well, and each branch is distinct enough that it deserves its own article rather than being crowded in here: an egg cracked on top to set in the residual heat, ground meat folded into the cheese, or sausage laid in before baking. Some kitchens finish the boat with a knob of butter rubbed along the hot rim, a touch that gilds the crust as it melts. The constant across all of them is the shape and the open-faced bake; change the filling and you have a different peinirli, but lose the boat and you no longer have one at all.